Making tiled textures?

[sevin]

I've been playing a lot of Insurgency recently and have been really impressed by the gorgeous textures and sound design on display in that game. I've been trying to create my own tileable textures for awhile now using my own photos, but haven't really been getting anywhere close to something workable. Here's an example:

The original photo:

The 512x512 texture:

As you can see, it's very obviously one image offset and cleaned up a little. Ugly. Nothing interesting about it. I copied and pasted a couple of the planks to go over more obviously repeating planks, but it doesn't help much. Compare this to one of the gorgeous wood textures in Insurgency:

So much more going on! No obvious repetitions! Gorgeous grain that actually has depth and looks old and worn. How did they do this? I downloaded Quixel dDo (the legacy version) awhile ago but I think you need to have a mesh to bake maps you should have already made for it to actually use dDo. Any thoughts?

[Vorontsov]

The insurgency planks look like a mix between hand-drawn and texturing, where they play around with masks and modifiers in photoshop (overlay,multiply,screen etc.) or whatever you would call them over their hand-drawn stuff

I can't explain it better, so hopefully if you don't understand someone can come in and ellaborate further

Ninja Edit: basically they don't just take a photo and tile it, they have texture artists who know what they're doing and who most of the time know how to digitally paint really well

Edited June 23, 2015 by Vorontsov

[esspho]

You could start by desatuaring your texture. By doing this you will loose that uneven blueish lighting. Just keep the basic wood structures and overlay them with flat colours. Maybe adjust the contrast a little bit and add a subtle layers of dirt and grime. To get that ragged look you could paint over the seams between the planks.

[Pampers]

[tomm]

I'd stay away from quixel tools, you won't learn much by dragging sliders and pressing buttons.

I think it's just a smart photo manipulation(lot of level adjusting and blending), also notice the difference in values, some planks are dark, others are bright.

[Vorontsov]

It doesn't have much detail aside from the photo itself, no scratches or other unique marks on the planks and they're all coloured the same, the repeating nails can be notched down to fewer numbers or removed 100% , I would also assume that it tiles pretty badly horizontally since both the left end and right end are carved inwards or whatever one would like to call it

[sevin]

Thanks for the responses so far guys. I suppose I should look around for some grunge brushes for Photoshop. Any suggestions? 

Also, my tiling is not very good as you've pointed out Vorontsov. Every tutorial on the internet seems to explain it in similar ways. They all use the clone stamp tool to remove seams created when you offset the texture so it tiles on itself. It's not a very good way of doing things as it still remains very obvious in more regular patterned textures like wood planks that it was simply offset. Is there anything else I can do for this? That Insurgency texture looks 100% unique all the way across it. Could it have been a picture offset like mine at some point, and then painted over a bunch to make it look as good and original as it does? 

[blackdog]

Well I would say you have a solid base to start, original picture was distorted and looks like you managed to make it tilable.

The kind of processing you do from here depends on the effect you want to achieve, ie: if you need a modern and clean set you are not gonna mess this up with filters too much.

Insurgency's texture has clearly some handpaint details to make tiles less obvious (you can do that sort of thing with a mouse, don't need a tablet to be clear), but on top there's at least another texture overlayed, giving that stained look. Most likely they used a color stain, rust or maybe even the Render>Cloud filter in PS, tweaked in transparency and rendering of that layer.

[OrnateBaboon]

Good tutorial for hand painting wood.

http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/woodrough/woodrough.html